Student Resources | Sociology: A Canadian Perspective 4e | Higher Education

Higher Education

Sociology, 4e: Chapter 06

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the Submit my answers button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:

________ defined social interactions and social forms as the basic subject matter of sociology.
a) Georg Simmel
b) Erving Goffman
c) George H. Mead
d) Robert K. Merton
e) Ferdinand Tonnies

Question 2:

Which of the following was NOT one of Robert Bales’ findings in his study of training groups at Harvard University?
a) The task leader helped the group organize itself to solve the problem that had been posed.
b) The emotional leader helped the group cope with frustration and conflict so that strong feelings did not deflect the group from its task.
c) The joker was the person who helped release tensions in the group by joking and fooling around.
d) The emotional leader helped set goals and organize the group.
e) The emotional leader was the peacemaker.

Question 3:

Mark Granovetter (1974) argues that ________.
a) weakly tied networks, based largely on indirect links, may be even more useful than strongly tied or completely connected networks
b) information, social support, and other valuable resources usually come from strongly tied networks
c) people in networks lack a sense of collective identity and a collective goal
d) people in networks lack an awareness of their membership and its characteristics
e) all of the above

Question 4:

With which of the following statements would Ferdinand Tonnies (1957 [1887]) NOT agree?
a) Rural and small-town life is characterized by Gemeinschaft, which includes a stable, homogenous group of residents with a strong attachment to one particular place.
b) City life is characterized by friendship, neighbouring, and working together.
c) Gemeinschaft is marked by dense or highly connected networks, centralized and controlling elites, and multiple social ties.
d) City life is characterized by Gesellschaft, which includes a diverse group of residents where people have impersonal, brief relationships and share few moral values.
e) In cities, people’s social networks are less connected and less centralized.

Question 5:

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of a group?
a) awareness of membership
b) all connected with one another
c) communicate, interact, and conduct exchanges with one another
d) people drawn together by common sentiments
e) more highly connected than a category and a more self-aware than a network

Question 6:

With which of the following statements would Charles Horton Cooley (1962 [1909]) NOT agree?
a) Primary groups are small and marked by regular face-to-face interaction.
b) An example of a secondary group is a family household.
c) Secondary groups are larger, and many members may not interact with one another regularly.
d) In a secondary group, there is a clear membership and a shared sense of collective existence.
e) Formal organizations are subtypes of secondary groups.

Question 7:

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of an organization?
a) a secondary group that has a collective goal or purpose
b) comprises a group of people working together
c) coordinated by communication and leadership to achieve a common goal or goals
d) can arise quickly to meet a single goal and then disband when the goal is achieved
e) always have multiple goals and leaders that are chosen formally

Question 8:

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of cliques?
a) a group of tightly interconnected people
b) spend a lot of time together and think and behave similarly
c) try to ignore or exclude outsiders
d) have a clear formal purpose
e) survive through “groupthink”

Question 9:

What do cliques do in school settings?
a) control their members by defining the behaviours that are proper and acceptable
b) leaders degrade and make fun of those who are lower in the hierarchy or outside the group
c) foster clique solidarity by clarifying the norms for acceptance and rejection
d) use gossip to reinforce their ignorance of outsiders and keep social distance from them
e) all of the above

Question 10:

Which of the following is NOT a basic feature of a bureaucracy?
a) Resources belong to the organization.
b) Office-holding is based on personal connections.
c) People move through organizational positions based on their merit.
d) Written rules govern most of the relationships in the organization.
e) There are well-defined chains of responsibility and authority.

Question 11:

Which of the following historical conditions did NOT lead to the development of Bureaucracy in its modern form?
a) European nation-building
b) capitalism
c) feudalism
d) industrialization
e) imperial conquest and colonization

Question 12:

Weber traced the rise of bureaucracies to the ________.
a) rise of capitalism and modern states and the secularization of human activities
b) rise of formal religion as a political power, which led to ‘rationalization’
c) increasing influence of Catholicism over Protestantism
d) declining influence of the monarchy and aristocracy
e) all of the above

Question 13:

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of work in bureaucracies?
a) Workers produce goods from start to finish.
b) There is a specialized division of labour.
c) Every member performs named and identified duties.
d) Workers are separated from the means of production.
e) There is a well-defined hierarchy of command, which serves to increase efficiency.

Question 14:

According to ________, a specialized division of labour became the foundation of modern industry and bureaucratization.
a) Max Weber
b) Karl Marx
c) Adam Smith
d) Davis and Moore
e) Robert K. Merton

Question 15:

Which of the following is an incorrect explanation of how bureaucracies are run?
a) Impersonality and objectivity helps the organization to achieve its objectives.
b) The duties, roles, and authority of each office are clearly defined.
c) Relationships between positions in a bureaucracy are personal relations between roles.
d) As long as they follow the rules attached to their office or position, they are secure in their jobs.
e) Hires employees based on the candidates’ technical competence.

Question 16:

What does Robert Merton (1957) mean by “bureaucratic personality”?
a) members who conform to rigid bureaucratic rules
b) members who recognize when the old rules are inappropriate
c) members who develop a trained capacity for dealing with new situations
d) members who see their clients as people with unique wants and needs
e) members who meet the unique needs of individual clients

Question 17:

Informal networks among people who interact on the job serve many purposes. Which of the following is NOT one of the purposes that it serves?
a) They humanize the organization.
b) They provide support and protection to workers at the higher levels of the hierarchy.
c) They serve as active channels of information flow and mechanisms for exchanging favours.
d) They direct the flow of information, enforce moral standards, and exclude people they consider inferior.
e) They can serve to free people from the limits of formal organization and, occasionally, allow them to protest and subvert their working conditions.

Question 18:

The Hawthorne effect refers to ________.
a) when people know they are subjects of an important experiment and receive special attention, they behave the way they think the researchers expect them to
b) when people know they are subjects of an important experiment, they do not act any differently
c) when workers know they are being watched, they do not care whether the researchers perceive them in a positive or a negative light
d) the fact that informal organizations can either help the formal organization to arrive at its goals or hinder it
e) the fact that workers are not as non-rational or irrational as managers might have wanted to believe, nor are they entirely focused on the pay cheque

Question 19:

With which of the following statements about gender in the workplace would feminist theorists such as Kanter (1977), Acker (1991), Ferguson (1984), and Cuneo (1990) NOT agree?
a) Women are heavily overrepresented in lower-level clerical and service occupations and under-represented in management.
b) The hierarchical structure of bureaucratic organizations and the accompanying sets of rigid rules and procedures are incompatible with female gender characteristics.
c) Women’s bodies and sexuality are often stigmatized in organizations and used for grounds of control and exclusion.
d) Women are seen as being compatible with organizational life because of their assumed ties to marriage and the responsibility for children.
e) The male image of the organizational worker causes women’s gender roles to be regarded as deviant.

Question 20:

Which of the following is an accurate statement about how bureaucracies actually work, rather than how they ought to work?
a) A failure to report information up the hierarchy never occurs.
b) Bureaucracies work the same for men and women.
c) Bureaucracies work differently in different countries.
d) Every member understands his or her role in a bureaucratic network of reporting relationships.
e) Workers avoid forming relationships on the job.

Question 21:

Trust in bureaucracies is ________.
a) built gradually
b) maintained continuously
c) easily destroyed
d) limited by organizational boundaries, which limits the sharing of ideas
e) all of the above

Question 22:

In the excerpt from the article entitled “How Hyundai became to auto industry’s pacesetter,” John Daly and Mitch Moxley (2010) argue that Hyundai is ________.
a) still a relatively young carmaker and essentially remains a family-run company
b) one of the key actors in the astonishing economic surge in South Korea since the 1960s
c) successful because of a national business culture that is hard-working, highly educated, ambitious, and export-oriented
d) successful because of South Korea’s growth as a result of central economic planning by authoritarian, pro-US regimes that have worked closely with a tightly knit network of several dozen family owned conglomerates
e) all of the above

Question 23:

How does a bureaucracy deal with problems such as worker motivation, recruitment, and training?
a) Bureaucracies give workers autonomy and rewards for corporate loyalty to keep the most able worker.
b) Bureaucracies give workers autonomy and rewards for corporate loyalty to keep the most able worker.
c) Bureaucracies advocate closed management rather than open management.
d) Bureaucracies separate customers from suppliers.
e) all of the avove

Question 24:

Why does the sheer size of large bureaucracies and their long-term outlook introduce certain types of irrationality that, in the end, may undermine the organization?
a) By making impersonal decisions and rewarding excellence, they are less able to pursue long-term organizational goals with huge amounts of wealth and power.
b) Bureaucracies work hard to control subjectivity and individuality, but in the end this undermines their productivity.
c) Workers develop bureaucratic personalities, so they are unwilling to ignore ethical concerns in order to follow corporate rules.
d) Rule by offices enhances personal responsibility for decisions the organization may take.
e) Members of bureaucracies have to take responsibility for collective decisions.

Question 25:

Which one of the following, according to Goffman (1961), is NOT a characteristic of a total institution?
a) Staff watch and control the behaviour of their ‘customers’ all the time.
b) Examples include mental hospitals, prisons, and military installations.
c) A total institution promotes mass education.
d) A total institution punishes and resocializes uncooperative ‘customers’.
e) Organizational principles of efficiency and procedural rigidity conflict with democratic values.